"the market agrees so it should be good for shareholders." yes for the shareholders UNLIMITED GREED and their OEM minions.
"I am sure lower cost is a further sweetener"... yeah right; specially for those losing their jobs... sorry; we want to make MORE money, bye.
The next job that is lost to foreign cheap labor, may be YOURS; loser.
"PS. Sad for the people who are going to be laid off though" ohhh so sorry, but you are not the one losing his job eh ?

Whats not to understand....I am aghast that you cant understand it.....May be your english skills are not on par with what you are doing...First, they are making the job cuts in the same proportion of their Geo employee spread and not focusing on one geo versus another...Second, The existing engineers on the AMD payroll dont have the skillset that they need in future and so, they are being chopped and they will hire new engineers that meet the skillset that they are looking for now....So, they are rehiring....why s that a red flag?

Whats not to understand....I am aghast that you cant understand it.....May be your english skills are not on par with what you are doing...First, they are making the job cuts in the same proportion of their Geo employee spread and not focusing on one geo versus another...Second, The existing engineers on the AMD payroll dont have the skillset that they need in future and so, they are being chopped and they will hire new engineers that meet the skillset that they are looking for now....So, they are rehiring....why s that a red flag?

Rank and rate programs are consistently abused across the industry. These programs are put in place to do exactly what AMD did, whack what AMD considered to be the bottom 10%.
Rank and rate is almost always used without any prior training or documentation, I know because I was a manager at a large semiconductor company, and yes I was required to lower rank for personal issues, including divorce.
Overall, when your hired as a full time employee you exchange higher pay for longer term employment and benefits. US companies over the past years have been consistently moving further and further away from this implied agreement, the latest invention here is rank and rate.

They need a redesign of their new FX CPUs. I was looking for these to be an Intel killer but apparently under single or few threads it does not know how to distribute them well as they may use 3 full (quasi dual cores), give each core it's own FP unit as AMD is still not keeping up with Intel on intelligent core throughput and encryption.
I have been waiting for the FX CPUs and was going to buy the FX8150 but if an Intel 2500 & 2600 part (lower and slightly higher price respectively) beat the pants off of their "top of the line" FX8150 then what is the point? All my systems are AMD Phenom 4 or 6 core and I am satisfied withem for now. Especially when those same parts beat the FX8150 in some of the less threaded programs. If you are only using your system for Video Rendering then have at it but even there the Intel 2600 part was dead-even with it.
Get with it AMD!

I totally agree with you, seaEE. If you want your "team" to be secretive and backstabbing, just add a rant and rave, then fire the bottom 10. It's how the corporations ensure that teams will never be productive.

"I don't know who came up with the scheme of rank & rate, but the notion of pitting employees against each other -- particularly those who work together as a team -- has always struck me as bizarre and counter-productive."
I enjoy engineering, but I don't believe the type of culture that this creates (and unfortunately it seems to be fairly pervasive) is a healthy one for doing engineering work!

The number you should be looking at is $118 mill, how else can they partition the layoffs to achieve that target.
This I guess is the amount they need to start on some new lateral business they are not in.